VacationSelector

Amsterdam or Cape Town?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Amsterdam
✓ Best match
65
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on year-round weather and value for money with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

AmsterdamCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 20 points.20
AmsterdamCape Town
Score4060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km3329
Coast distance24 km1 km
Water distance24 km1 km
Places to eat. Amsterdam leads by 16 points.16
AmsterdamCape Town
Score8367
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,957650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4442
Museums & heritage. Amsterdam leads by 26 points.26
AmsterdamCape Town
Score8054
Museums within 10 km9825
Museums within 2 km of centre6920
Share of museums within 2 km %7080
Unesco sites within 50 km53
Nightlife. Amsterdam leads by 23 points.23
AmsterdamCape Town
Score7047
Drinking venues within 4 km1,543483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,078389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7081
Nightclubs within 4 km11447
Nature & day trips. Amsterdam leads by 24 points.24
AmsterdamCape Town
Score6036
Protected land share 50 km %216
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8242
Park area within 2 km49 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Amsterdam leads by 32 points.32
AmsterdamCape Town
Score6836
Tourist attractions within 2 km7419
Park area within 2 km49 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Amsterdam leads by 23 points.23
AmsterdamCape Town
Score6845
Notable places within 2 km19651
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
AmsterdamCape Town
Score5885
Price level global79.240.5
Daily budget€181—
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 29 points.29
AmsterdamCape Town
Score5786
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.1 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 85 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months06
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Amsterdam
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
7
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Amsterdam
6
5
6
8
12
15
17
19
17
15
11
8
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Amsterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Amsterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Amsterdam
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Amsterdam: 1991-2020 normals, De Bilt (35.3 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAmsterdamCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€93-112
AMS · 12 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
JohannesburgJNB, HLA
11 h 15 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
2 h 10 m
€162-179
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€166-175
AMS · 12 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 5 m
€152-186
AMS · 12 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
€178-300
AMS · 12 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
€512-556
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€318-346
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 25 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
13 h 0 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
12 h 10 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureAmsterdamCape Town
Official languageDutchEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number112 or 911112
Elevation-2 m5 m
Main airportAmsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS)12 km from centre287 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureAmsterdamCape Town
City population921,4683,776,313
People per km²4,2081,538
Museums within 10 km10122
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km53
Distinct cuisines in the centre9865
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Amsterdam or Cape Town somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.